Five Lessons from the Maryland Appellate Blog’s First Year

Today marks the one-year anniversary of the blog’s official launch. Here are five quick lessons I’ve learned as editor-in-chief.

Howard Bashman is the kingmaker of appellate blogging.

The blog has featured exactly 100 posts and received just under 29,000 hits. Our two top referrers are Howard Bashman’s How Appealing blog (1,877 hits) and Twitter (1,764 hits). But looking behind the numbers, only about 9 of our posts have made it onto Howard’s blog, while almost every post was tweeted. Making SCOTUSblog’s roundup is a big deal (7 appearances, 1,038 hits), but How Appealing is, to borrow a baseball term, “The Show.”

LinkedIn? Not so much.

Despite numerous posts, including in various appellate forums, the blog has had a mere 88 referrals from LinkedIn. Eighty-eight! We’ve had more referrals from the Fourth Circuit’s internal site. LinkedIn can be a valuable tool, particularly for alumni activities. It’s nearly useless as a driver of appellate blog traffic.

Notwithstanding the previous four lessons, it’s important not to get caught up in statistics. We’ve had some great Maryland-centric posts that, naturally, haven’t drawn much interest outside our borders. But that’s fine. Reaching 100 fellow Maryland lawyers is a big deal. We’re an MSBA Litigation Section publication, and I’m proud of our coverage of Maryland’s appellate courts.

It’s subjective whether 29,000 hits in a year is great or puny. What I do know is that our editorial board – Jonathan Biran, Karen Federman Henry, Brad McCullough, Erin Murphy, Alan Sternstein, Derek Stikelather, Michael Wein, and blog manager Chris Mincher – has done a great job over the past year, and they have my thanks. So does the MSBA Litigation Section for giving us this opportunity.

Most importantly, we here at the blog are grateful for each of our readers. Please keep following and reading. In the words of the (possibly immortal) Stan Lee, “Excelsior!”